[ILUG] Update on that distro for old hardware debate...

[Glen Gray]

Just a quick point touching on the discussions last week about new
distros on old hardware. I don't want to ignite a distro war again. But
I upgraded my P90 w/80MB over the weekend. It had a minimal install on
RedHat 7.2 and I upgraded it to 7.3. 7.3 wanted to install a lot more
stuff than I had intended but I wasn't using up much space on the 4GB
disk so I didn't bother. I could have forced it to trim down installing
Mozilla and nautilus etc. but in light of the recent discussion I wanted
to see how it performed.

And I must say I was impressed. I actually had Gnome 1.4 desktop with
Nautilus windows open and Mozilla open with several tabs. It was a
little slow to load Nautilus and Mozilla but once loaded they where
quite usable. 

And once I finished messing about with it and went back to it being my
HAN server I'm still surprised by it's performance. It's much nippier.
The new RH kernel has the low-latency and preemptive kernel patches
installed so I'm presuming these are making all the difference on the
old hardware (lets face it, the P90's motherboard is SLOW). This coupled
with the various speed improvements to the Gnome framework are probably
why the gnome desktop was usable. 

As per usual other people's millage will vary and my idea of usable
might be ridiculous to other people. Just my 2 cent worth.
-- 
_______________________________________
Glen Gray             Software Engineer
a n t e f a c t o     t: +353 1 8586006
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181 Parnell Street - Dublin 1 - Ireland